The entire valley of the Rio Grande, from El Paso to Brownsville, grows many species of cactus, and other prickly coriaceous shrubs.
In the western and southwestern parts the summer months are the wettest and the spring months are the driest; thus, at El Paso the rainfall amounts to 2.2 in.
In 1903 the El Paso drain was completed, to unwater the western half of the field to the 880-ft.
These two lines, popularly called the Mexican Central and Mexican National, have their northern termini at Ciudad Juarez and Laredo on the Rio Grande and connect with American trunk lines at El Paso and Laredo.
It possesses unlimited supplies, as yet not greatly exploited, of fine building stones, some oil and asphalt, and related bituminous products, a few precious and semi-precious stones (especially tourmalines, beryls and aquamarines found near Canyon near the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas river), rare opalized and jasperized wood (in the eastern part of the El Paso county), considerable wealth of lead and copper, enormous fields of bituminous coal, and enormous wealth of the precious metals.
